ViCon - Towards Understanding Visual Support Systems in Collaborative Video Conferencing

While meetings take up a significant part of the workday, participants often perceive them as poor and unproductive. With the surge in videoconferencing meetings for work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees experienced that videoconferencing can even aggravate negative experiences in meetings. Past research has shown that the level of engagement during meetings is a crucial aspect of meeting a success. While there have been some attempts towards utilizing post-analysis feedback, there is little effort towards real-time support to improve engagement. This research explores the development of a visual support system for automated, real-time feedback on team communication behavior during online meetings. We present a novel, fully working visual support system that was evaluated with positive results. This study outlines the step-wise development of the method. We collected a range of qualitative feedback measures to understand better how users perceive the visual support system. First, we collected qualitative feedback from participants and eye-tracking data (n = 4) to evaluate four visualization approaches. The second step evaluated the best-performing visualization by a user study with participants (N = 72) working in groups of four on a collaborative problem-solving task. Users give the tool good scores on a seven-point Likert scale: perceived usefulness (4.8), ease of understanding (5.6), and perceived precision (5.1). Our results indicate that our novel system can enhance the quality of video conferencing through real-time visual support.